Welcome to 'Stephen Riley Art' - the website of artist Stephen Riley
My work is concerned with the experience and use of space.
In some of my work, particularly my photography*, this expresses itself as an exploration of how the spaces we create around ourselves, and those created long before our time but which we can still see and ponder, become tableaux that reflect countless aspects of our human condition: aspiration, anxiety, love, humour, grief, anger, arrogance, folly and so on.
In other work, most visibly in my painting, space is considered in a more abstract way. In this I explore spatial possibilities within the formal elements of painting, many of which emerge as competing dualities. For example: relationships between pictorial space and actual physical space, in the form of depth or layers, or objects placed on the picture surface; and those between colours, forms, lines, edges and zones of particular kinds of paint handling that can suggest hints of pictorial depth or relative location.
Of course, even abstract painting cannot escape connotation. It is this inevitability and the fact that things seen in the environment can sometimes be triggers for ideas in the first place that reconnect the second type of work to the first. However, abstract painting remains more open and leaves more space both for creative exploration for myself as the artist and for subjective interpretation on the part of the viewer.
*photographic works are not featured on this website. However a selection can be seen on my Facebook ‘wall’ page - see 'Links'
Stephen Riley Phd - Artist
Contemporary British Fine Art
Abstract Painting
www.stephenrileyart.com